And what is still more important, we have to observe that it was the characteristic note and signal glory of the French revolutionary school, to subordinate mere knowledge to the practical work of raising society up from the corruption and paralysis to which it had been brought by the double action of civil and ecclesiastical authority.

The efforts of the Encyclopaedists were not disinterested in the sense of being vague blows in the air.

Their aim was not theory but practice, not literature but life.

The Encyclopaedists were no doubt all men of battle, and some of them were hardly more than mere partisans.
But Diderot at least had constantly in mind the great work which remained after the battle should be won.

He was profoundly conscious that the mere accumulation of knowledge of the directly physical facts of the universe would take men a very short way towards reconstruction.
And he struck the key-note in such admirable passages as this: "One consideration especially that we ought never to lose from sight is that, if we ever banish a man, or the thinking and contemplative being, from above the surface of the earth, this pathetic and sublime spectacle of nature becomes no more than a scene of melancholy and silence.